“That why they tossed you out of graduate school?” Savas asked absentmindedly, still squinting at the screen, trying to see the pattern.
Hernandez sighed. “No one believes me that I quit! Honestly, John, there were weirder people there than me.”
“Yeah, but not so much trouble.”
“Can't a man just want to serve his nation in the war on terror?”
Savas smiled and waved his hand at the screen. “I give up. Don't have a computer science PhD. Explain.”
Hernandez opened several windows from online news organizations. All were dated reports, weeks to months old, from diverse locations across the globe. Each had an image of a dead body and police. The headlines in every case contained the word “assassinated.”
“Manuel, what are we looking at here…and why?” asked Savas.
“Since I wasn't getting anywhere looking for a who, I started looking for a what. What unsolved crimes in the last two years might have matched the MO we have in this case? Honestly, after drawing a big zero in the database, my feeling was that our killer, or killers, weren't in there, that we are looking for something, someone new. Our fancy intel databases were useless. Where else left to go but the papers?”
Savas nodded. “OK, what are we looking at?”
“It's thin, John, but there's something. Remember the Al Jazeera reporter killed in Atlanta, right as he exited the airport?”
“Mohammed Aref? Of course I do. Larry reassigned the case while I was in the hospital. Lighten my workload, he said. Aref was a real tap dancer. He had been implicated by the Sheikh in money laundering through some of the East Coast mosques.”
“The Sheikh?”
Savas smiled. “My little double-agent friend.”
“The one we don't mention, whose real name not even Larry knows?”
“That one.”
“So, he ratted out Aref?”
“And several others, as he collected from them, too, no doubt. The Sheikh's a real charmer.” Savas grinned. “Second-generation Syrian street punk. Broke away from his conservative parents, but not before he picked up enough Arabic to make him very valuable to certain underground elements. Kid's addicted to gold and adrenaline, and likes to feel smarter than everyone he's conned.”
“That's what you call charming?”
“Anyway, the Al Jazeera job was a cover for Aref, for his real work. He had a good scheme going. Charity dollars from many uncharitable sources. We used Aref to trace an assassination plot against a diplomat from Pakistan. We're still planning to move on the entire operation, as far as I know.” Savas glanced down at the computer scientist. “The connection?”
Hernandez gestured toward the screen. “Aref was gunned down by a high-powered sniper rifle. Single shot. Right through the heart. Sound familiar?”
Savas furrowed his brows. “Coincidence?”
“And so's this, I suppose,” said Manuel as he enlarged another window. Savas read aloud from the web page.
“Raahil Hossain, a lawyer and lobbyist for a Saudi construction conglomerate, was gunned down today in Egypt on a business trip. Known for his outspoken stance on Arab rights of ownership of oil and gas sites developed by foreign powers, he had become a controversial figure in the international community. Condemned by many Western governments for alleged ties to jihadist movements in several countries, he had found his ability to travel outside the Middle East increasingly restricted.”
“Skip to the next-to-last paragraph.”
Savas paused and scrolled the text up on the monitor. “Reports claim that Mr. Hossain was struck by a bullet as he exited his hotel in Cairo and that he died instantly, suffering a direct hit to the chest. The gunman was never found; police speculated that the killer had fired a high-powered rifle from a distance and escaped in the ensuing panic.”
Savas was quiet for a moment. Hernandez used the silence to bring up a list of names, dates, and locations. He rolled his chair backward and let Savas lean in closer, reading through the file.
“All killed by snipers,” mumbled Savas as he read silently through the list. “All taking direct hits that killed them instantly. Each a player in the underground terrorist network. There must be twenty names here, Manuel. You think that they're all linked?”
“I don't know, John. Some don't exactly fit — head shots, for example, even though in some of those cases the bullets were identified to be military grade. Not the special ordnance you discovered, but we don't know how careful the ballistics teams were, whether they did their homework like your contacts. Half these kills were in parts of the world where they likely don't even do a full workup, let alone release the data.”
Savas put on his best Larry Kanter voice. “This is really thin, Manuel.”
Hernandez nodded dejectedly. “Yeah, John, I know. But it's all I have.”
“I didn't say I thought it was wrong.” Savas sat down and breathed out slowly, lost in thought. “Do you remember those studies at Army Research focusing on soldiers in Iraq who had a high rate of survival?”
“Not really, John.”
“I do, because I found it fascinating. A large number of those soldiers were characterized by strong emotional responses to environments, having hunches and gut feelings about danger. The studies showed that these guys tended to have hyperactive attention to detail, keen sight and other senses, noticing absurd details others missed, yet they were not consciously aware of it.”
“Yeah, now I remember. Like the soldier who thought ‘the concrete slab didn't look right’ and inside was an IED waiting to blow them apart.”
“Exactly. He had processed a lot of data subconsciously about the slab — imperfections, mismatches in colors, location, and so on — and without knowing why, his brain sent an alert. All he knew was, it looked wrong.”
Hernandez shrugged his shoulders nervously. “So what's that got to do with this?”
Savas looked back at the list of names compiled by his computer systems man. “After reading that article, I started believing in intuition, Manuel, that it's often much more than simple flighty emotion. Sure, in some percentage of the population it is flighty, useless stuff, and that's why we get nut-jobs paranoid about things that aren't there, conspiracy theories, and people afraid of their own shadow. But for those with a history of survival, or of finding solutions to puzzles, let's say, with few clues, I think it's real, representing a lot of neurological processing we aren't aware of.”
Hernandez simply stared at Savas.
“What I'm trying to say, Manuel, is that I know this is thin,” he said, gesturing to the list. “I can't justify it logically, but my gut tells me there's something here. I think yours did, too. There's something in that list. Like that cement block, it doesn't look right. There's something there.”
“What?”
“I wish I knew. There are a lot of dead men on that list.”
5
Kanter stood up and leaned over the table, an exasperated expression on his face. “This is what makes sense?”
Standing up was the first sign that things were not going well for Savas. Kanter didn't usually stand unless he was upset. Once Kanter began running his fingers through his graying hair, Savas knew that he had lost him. It was only a matter of time before the lecture began.
“This is the special meeting of Intel 1 you called me in for? You do realize that I manage other groups in this division?”